Ponderings of a Scientist

This is totally inconsequential on its own, but hints at the deeper issue of Americans total lack of grammatical knowledge. I hate when people don’t put the grammatically appropriate two spaces after periods and colons! That’s it back to my busy day, just couldn’t let that little pet peeve fester.

“Young Americans are Geographically Illiterate”, National Georgraphic reports today. When tested, they did poorly on US geography and terribly on world geography. My question to you is: Is this their fault or the school systems’? I’ll admit that I’m a bit geographically illiterate myself, but I blame the fact that I didn’t have one geography class my whole life and I’m now playing catch up. In fact I can’t even remember covering geography in any class. When I was a teacher the 7th Grade “history” course was a whole year of geography, which is great, but I don’t think many schools have such a program.

In continuing with the below discussion…a lesson on main stream media (for the uninformed).
Big Business owns everything in the U.S (and most of the world) including our politicians and the media.
ABC, ESPN, Lifetime Television, A&E, History Channel and E! - Disney owns part or all
NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, Court TV, Bravo, A&E, History Channel, MSNBC-GE owns part or all these networks, the
“MS” stands for microsoft
CBS and CMT (country music TV)- Westinghouse Electric (and nuclear)
FOX - Fox Network
owned by ultra conservative Rubert Murdoch (board of directors for
Phillip Morris)
Paramount Television, Spelling Television, MTV, VH-1, Showtime, The
Movie Channel, UPN, Nickelodeon, Comedy
Central, Sundance
Channel - Viacom International
CNN, HBO, Cinemax, TBS Superstation, Turner Network Television,
Turner Classic Movies, Warner Brothers Television,
Cartoon Network,
Sega Channel, TNT, Comedy Central, E!, Court TV - Time Warner

Check out this website to see everything else these companies own (amusement parks, sports teams, etc.). Check out this movie, previously posted on Zipy’s site, to see the above list in musical comedy form.

Time for dinner!

I must be brief because I have a bunch of work to get to;
however, I need to relinquish my brain of some rantings in order to focus
effectively on my work.

1) Why is it that the
people whom (or is it who?) could most benefit from the stairs always ride the
elevator? I mean, come on, my building only has two floors, unless you are disabled
(and no fat is not a disability) or very ill you can make it up one flight of
stairs.

2) I hate our bipartisan political system. It only serves to a) divide people and b) divide
all issues into black and white. “If were right, you must be wrong.”

a)
People need to be able to think freely about the
issues, to compare their value systems to those of the candidates and to vote
for individuals based on those comparisons.
Anyone who always votes a certain party, just because of what the party
as a whole has historically stood for, is selling themselves short and only
helping to perpetuate the ever growing partisan divide.

b)
How many times have you heard this on the news, “In
actuality most people are not republican or democrat, they fall somewhere in
between.” NO, just because you do no associate
as republican or democrat does not mean you are in the middle. As much as the democrats can only define
themselves as anti-republican, these are not opposite entities. Looking at the political spectrum as a linear
line, republicans do not fall all the way on the right, nor do democrats fall
all the way on the left, there is definitely more room on the left (think Green
Party) and there is definitely room all over the right for Christian republicans,
social republicans, economic republicans and those that just say they are
republicans, but can’t explain why. The
best thing that could happen for this country is for another party or two or
five to gain some say. The Republocrats
or the Democans could easily form and encompass all our sensible Congressmen,
you know that group of middle of the road voters, who work together when they
agree on a topic irrelevant of party lines.
Once we get a middle party, we could easily get an environmental
party. Oh and what a better place the US
would be when we can debate individual topics, and chose candidates that
express their opinions, instead of for the politician that best appeases his or
her “base”. If we think of the political
spectrum on multiple axes we open our thoughts to even more possibilities. Guess what, just because I disagree with you
on one topic, you are not right and I’m not wrong. If only we could sit down and have an honest
talk about our views and how we came to have them I bet we could empathize with
each other, just maybe we are both right!

I could go on, but I think you get the idea; if not read
this, “Wake UP, turn on your brain, THINK, be an individual, don’t get
controlled by propaganda and political band wagoning. We can make the country and even better place
if we get take the time to choose our representatives based on who they are,
not what they call themselves.

Two separate streams of thought brought together by one,
unfortunately, not shocking title.

Yesterday I overhead this, “I can speak it better then I can
write it.” I will not say who spoke this
quote to protect his/her stupidity.
However, when I heard this I wanted to scream, “what is wrong with our
educational system” that a person can present a concept better in impromptu
speech than in the written word, the written word that can be pondered and
revised. People do not learn grammar or
vocabulary anymore (man I sound like I’m old; I guess I just lucked out with a
good school system and involved parents).
People don’t even learn penmanship anymore, as long as your kid can connect
the dotted lines to make As, Bs and Cs who cares if he makes the pen strokes
backwards!

Yesterday while reading I came across an article on the administration’s
2007 budget proposal. Can you guess what
department he is proposing to cut the most programs from? You say, no it can’t be the Department of
Education (DOE), what about “No Child Left Behind” or is that “No Child Gets
Ahead” (thank you to which ever one of my friends came up with that witting
comment). He proposes cutting programs
to help the disadvantaged make the grade, programs to help all students compete
globally, programs to help families pay for college (Like new high school grads
need less help affording college.. lets see I owe $20K and that is the least
out of the five friends I had dinner with the other night). The only good thing I can say about the
budget proposal is the Congress has pretty much already written it off and will
hopefully come out with more appropriate appropriations. To see the DOE spending plan go here; the
section titled “Restraining Spending and Managing for Results” is a good read.

Due to high polling numbers I will now discuss the trials
and tribulations of the twenty something.
Let’s see:

College – it costs a lot to learn a little and you now need
a whole series of letters after your name to get a job.

Jobs – Who has one and how long did it take you to get
it? Do you get paid nearly enough to pay
for all the letters you have after your name?
I doubt it. It takes 2 or 3
degree to qualify for temp work making 30K with not benefits

Health Care – Who has health care? Our country needs to do something to help
recent grads get affordable coverage.

Politics – We are opinionated and politically active, yet
our administration doesn’t represent our views.
We are against the establishment!

Home Ownership – I laugh at my own desperate desire to own a
home. Anyone have an extra $300K+
hanging around so I can buy a starter condo or a rundown 2 bedroom?

The list could go on further, but I think I will stop
here. Looking at the list, I would say,
yeah us current twenty somethings have some new issues to deal with, but if you
can’t see how these themes are universal to just about every generation before
us then you need to study up on your history.
Anyone, even the history-phobes, should be able to see the similarities
with the 1960s- hum an unnecessary war fought for political reasons, major environmental
issues, do I need to go on? Anyone with
a little more historical perspective should see the similarities with the 20s,
30s, 40s, 50s, and 70s. We may have it
worse than the twenty year olds of the 80s and 90s, but that’s about it. So for that person at Zipy’s work who thinks we
are fighting a new war, your wrong SORRY!

In the name of full disclosure I feel it necessary to lay
out my ideological framework for any of you who haven’t already had the
pleasure of debating with me or listening to my verbose ranting, usually as the result of reading some new book or listening to NPR.-*Warning advice coming, avert eyes as desired, author is not responsible for injury* READ!! and listen to NPR (I recommend the Diane Rehm show…most intelligent conversation on the radio…again I don’t know how to link our I would direct you to her site for podcasts and other archived media). NPR is the only non-conservatively biased news broadcast in the U.S. and its only slightly liberally biased, which really means it caters to intelligent people who make obvious decisions based on the facts in front of them.

Well thanks to my drifting from the thesis sentence of
paragraph one you can begin to get a sense of my ideological framework, aha my scrabbled thought process actually has an underpinning of order. Back to business with a little anecdote: before upgrading to my current career, I was
a high school science teacher and my loving students (they really did love me…ah to be a teen idol again) would say to me “Mrs. H. you’re a tree-hugger”. They were right, in the sense that I care about the environment, drive a hybrid car (wot, stop the over consumption of
fossil fuels), eat organic food (wot, stop the over consumption of poorly
treated animals, pesticides and genetically modified organisms), and think
whales are cute. Well, I don’t really think whales are cute, as a fisheries biologist I have much deeper, more scientific, opinions on cetaceans and the role they play in the ocean, but that is for another day.

I wouldn’t call myself a hippie (think 1960’s), but I do live my life while being conscience of our Earth and how its mistreatment pollutes nature and ourselves (although I’m not perfect, unfortunately I’m currently commuting 100 miles each day for work- stupid economy- and spend too
much money on fashionable clothing). In fact, I live my life more conscientiously then many of the true 1960’s hippies currently do. Dad what happened to you and your buddies??? To many once objectors of the status quo are now conservative, nascar car watching, rednecks (this is meant to be minimally offensive and thought provoking to former hippies near and dear to me). I applaude those of you that have not let the big business, wasteful, consumer-driven bandwagon (that word again!) plow you over. As for the rest of us, all I’m saying is take the extra minute to think about the decisions you make everyday. For example, next time you are at the market buying fish, select something local and support your neighbors, not a foreign country, select something caught sustainably and support the continued consumption of fish as a good quality protein instead of supporting the collapse of fish populations. If your grocer doesn’t know the answers to
your questions or can’t supply you with good quality products (this goes for
things besides fish for those of you not seafood inclined) go somewhere else,
your dollars spent in the correct places, whether you like it or not, help
force change, more than just about anything else you can do.

As you can see I have a lot of things to get off my chess. Apparently, I should have started this blogging thing earlier (Zipy and others no comments please). In an attempt to not scare off my small, but growing, readership I will end here today, take a deep breath and when I blog again I will have a clear focus. I will give you my biased view on only one topic and I will hopefully present it in a persuasive, yet not offensive manner.

Help, help the tornado is sucking me in and I can’t get
out. I feel like an over engorged dairy
cow caught up in a Midwest twister…..

Yep its official, I have been sucked into the wave of
disaster that is the somewhat intelligent banter of a group of 20 somethings
whom I happen to know and love who insist on making public their lives and their
commentary on the aforementioned lives.
I have been pulled onto the bandwagon as the phase goes (although I’m
not exactly sure what a bandwagon is! I
have a funny picture of a frontier style wagon traveling the Oregon
Trail, with an 80’s Hair Band singing ballads atop the roof).

Well, I blame this most recent downfall of mine to two
things: 1) while I love my new job, I seem to work faster then the collective
whole here or don’t get assigned enough work, so I’m occasionally bored, and 2)
I find myself increasingly perturbed when ZipyMonkey doesn’t post something I
find of “bloggable” interest in our lives.
(Yeah don’t expect any links from me. One I don’t know how to make them and two I
find them rather distracting-what you see is what you get.)

So now that I’ve explained myself I would like to opine on
something poignant… Hum… nothing is coming to mind. I will return to work and await a thought
(stay tuned this could take a while… hours not days).